{"title":"Image War: Interview with Marie-José Mondzain","authors":"T. B. B. G. Chang, Zervoudaki Nefeli Forni","doi":"10.1177/01968599221105218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221105218","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, Marie-José Mondzain, prominent French philosopher, historian, and cultural critic, discusses some of the key concepts in critical visual studies central to her work. In her typical keen, learned fashion, Mondzain demonstrates the unbreakable relationships among image, desire, subjectivity, collective identity, and the broader sociocultural milieu, in which image making and unmaking work in situ to constitute our political realities and the conflicts therein. Never a mere visual object, an image, as Mondzain shows, is as dynamic an element in the display of power as all the acts of negotiations and struggles that make up what is called politics. In plain but lively language and peppered with ticking examples, Mondzain’s replies to the interviewer provide a helpful introduction to her work on culture, theory, criticism, and politics over more than forty years.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49398305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unsaid or Empty Speech: The act of Being Silenced: Language of Silence of Women and its Implications in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart","authors":"Yaw-kan Joseph Peter","doi":"10.1177/01968599221102523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221102523","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explored how women are silenced in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It drew on Parpart’s (Rethinking silence, gender and power in insecure sites: Implications for feminist security studies in a postcolonial world. Review of International Studies, 46(3), 315–324 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021051900041X ) insight that a person who is silenced, who cannot say what is on their mind or speak out against injustice, can quite rightly be seen as lacking agency. Our critical reception of the works of Darko and Achebe revealed that women, or the female characters have been built, programmed and oriented with weakness, zero authority and playing second fiddle to their male counterparts. We argued that the nature of the silencing of the women: (1) depicted the various instances of women’s subjugation, subordination, submission, and compliance, amongst other things, in male dominated traditional societies, (2) encapsulated the hegemonic issues in the patriarchal society feminist scholars vehemently write against, and (3) demonstrated that silence is a marker for empty speech, the unsaid, or keeping something to the self. The paper is a contribution to further studies on gender roles and the discourse on gendered power imbalances.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45548496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hacking Culture Not Code: How American Racism Fuels Russia's Century-Long Memetic Disinformation Campaign","authors":"Bobbie Foster Bhusari, Krishnan Vasudevan, Sohana Nasrin","doi":"10.1177/01968599221103801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221103801","url":null,"abstract":"This study develops upon recent scholarship about the Russian government's digital influence campaign to cultivate Black Americans during the 2016 election by rooting their efforts within a century-long strategy to exploit racial inequality to discredit and damage American democracy. Guided by Shifman’s (2013) construct of memetics, we employed a novel methodology that combined journalistic fact-checking and critical, qualitative analysis to study 164 Facebook advertisements targeted at Black Americans. These advertisements closely resembled Soviet-era propaganda and new disinformation strategies facilitated by the affordances of Facebook. Our findings reveal the advertisements exploited Facebook's interactive design and used an insider's voice to share real news about racial inequality, celebrate Black culture, and coordinate civic action. This study's methodological approach provides a meaningful framework for understanding how actors hack and deploy cultural knowledge to spread disinformation through social media platforms.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44334083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rape, Popular Culture, and Nirbhaya: A Study of India's Daughter and Delhi Crime","authors":"B. Rajan, Devaleena Kundu, Sahana Sarkar","doi":"10.1177/01968599221102527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221102527","url":null,"abstract":"The brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) on a bus in New Delhi became worldwide news in 2012. Widely known as the Nirbhaya rape incident, it was a landmark case that led the Indian government to amend existing criminal laws on sexual violence and rape. The rape also came to transform the media landscape into a space of social activism. Despite that popular cultural representations of the incident have been critiqued for appropriating rape myths. Through a thematic analysis of the BBC documentary, India's Daughter (2015), and the Netflix series, Delhi Crime (2019), the paper examines the ways in which popular culture sustains and furthers rape culture. By interrogating the thematic-cum-visual discourse of these texts, this paper explores the ideological and sexual tropes to understand the cultural configuration of rape and rape victims/survivors. The study finds the ongoing discourse centering rape in popular culture to be a reiteration of the patriarchal norms prevalent in Indian society.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48417994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: The Journalism Manifesto by Barbie Zelizer, Pablo J. Boczkowski, & C. W. Anderson","authors":"Patrick R. Johnson","doi":"10.1177/01968599221102561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221102561","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43626882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere by Jacob Johanssen","authors":"M. Asuman","doi":"10.1177/01968599221102555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221102555","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47041677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Facts Do Care about Your Feelings: The “Assertive Turn” in Emergent Attributes of the Contemporary U.S. Public Sphere","authors":"Joshua Foust, Burton St. John","doi":"10.1177/01968599221099646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221099646","url":null,"abstract":"After the January 6th, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, it seemed clear that the public sphere in the U.S. was being challenged by political extremists. Yet, existing public sphere normative theories provide unsatisfying tools for explaining why the riots occurred. Participants in the contemporary U.S. public sphere do not seem to recognize the legitimacy of their political opponents, and there is an increasing turn toward raw assertion instead of rational deliberation. In this essay, we discuss these shortcomings, focusing on how internet-mediated communication makes basic assumptions about legitimacy and rationality untenable. We settle on the concept of an “assertive turn” in the public sphere and analyze how anti-rationalism is becoming dominant in political discourse. We then argue for a scholarly reckoning with the social reality of 21st century U.S. politics—mainly that there are significant gaps in normative theory when it comes to addressing the assertive turn in the U.S. public sphere.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65201606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Community Media Coverage of Gender Issues: Struggles and Successes in Rural India","authors":"Annapurna Sinha","doi":"10.1177/01968599221096645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221096645","url":null,"abstract":"The study explores the struggles and successes of community media journalists in covering gender issues and violence against women in remote rural areas in India. The article introduces some small-scale community newspapers from the country's hindsight and presents an elaborative case study of Khabar Lahariya that prioritise gender issues in the content. The study records the presence and efforts of Khabar Lahariya in the reporting of gender issues by providing testimonies and examples from the field. The women journalists of the organisation successfully create a discourse around gender issues and bring about change in the Bundelkhand region by covering stories of violence and atrocities against women with their gender-sensitive perspective and unshakable confidence. At the same time, they put their own safety at risk for social change. Interestingly, a documentary film on the struggles of these women journalists has made its entry to Oscar nominations for the year 2022.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41956069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representational Politics in the Film Series “Asian Americans”: The Contestation of Identity Essentialism","authors":"Anh A. T. Nguyen","doi":"10.1177/01968599221096644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221096644","url":null,"abstract":"This paper highlights counternarratives of identity essentialism (re)producing representational conflations to normalize the existing system of social hierarchies. Analyzing anti-hegemonic discourses of identity in the film series “Asian Americans”, I propound how anti-essentialist critiques work as a rhetorical vehicle for constructing coalitional possibilities. This essay reinstates the importance of deconstructing binary logics in understanding social and cultural relations regulating Asian/American derogatory representations. Unpacking the invisibility of ideological power in administering representational strategies, this essay employs intersectional lenses to visualize the contradiction of Asian/American politics reclaimed by the dynamic integration of capitalism, transnationalism, imperialist militarism, and racially sexual fetishism. Representational complexity thus becomes a modality of analytic unveiling the presence of power relations in racially gendering Asian/Americans.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138518612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Revolution Will Be Forwarded: Interrogating India's WhatsApp Imaginary","authors":"Jessica Maddox, Shaheen Kanthawala","doi":"10.1177/01968599221095177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221095177","url":null,"abstract":"WhatsApp is one the world's most popular social media apps, as well as one of the most popular chat-based, closed platforms. Utilizing the insights from 19 in-depth interviews, we approach WhatsApp from a cultural perspective of ritual communication, seeking to understand how people make sense of WhatsApp use in their daily lives. We found WhatsApp is largely used to maintain community and fellowship with friends, coworkers, family, and even acquaintances or strangers. However, WhatsApp use is not wholly cohesive or harmonious. Social life on WhatsApp can become highly fragmented given numerous groups, and more groups mean more messages that individuals struggle to keep up with. We define the central nature of WhatsApp in Indian social life as India's WhatsApp imaginary, in which ritualized mobile media practices intertwine with cultural contexts to transcend borders, connect people via mobile affordances, and sustain daily social and business lives.","PeriodicalId":45677,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Communication Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47182254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}